apportionment had come, and this vast, strange room in New Orleans was to be thescene of the arrangementIt was the home of Carter's literary and financial executor the distinguishedCreole student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny.Carter had met de Marigny during the war, when they both served in the FrenchForeign Legion, and had at once cleaved to him because of their similar tastesand ontlook. When, on a memorable joint furlough, the Iearned young Creole hadtaken the wistful Boston dreamer to Bayonne, in the south of France, and hadshown him certain terrible secrets in the nighted and immemorial crypts thatburrow beneath that brooding, eon-weighted city, the friendship was foreversealed. Carrer's will had named de Marigny as executor, and now that avidscholar was reluctantly presiding over the settlement of the estate. It was sadwork for him, for like the old Rhode Islander he did not believe that Carter wasdead. But what weight had the dreams of mystics against the harsh wisdom of theworld?Around the table in that strange room in the old French Quarter sat the men whoclaimed an interest in the proceedings. There had been the usual legaladvertisements of the conference in papers wherever Carter's heirs were thoughtto live; yet only four now sat listening to the abnormal ticking of that coffin-shaped clock which told no earthly time, and to the bubbling of the courtyardfountain beyond half-curtained, fan-lighted windows. As the hours wore on, thefaces of the four were half shrouded in the curling fumes from the tripods,which, piled recklessly with fuel, seemed to need less and less attention fromthe silently gliding and increasingly nervous old Negro.There was Etienne de Marigny himself slim, dark, handsome, mustached, and stillyoung. Aspinwall, representing the heirs, was white-haired, apoplectic-faced,side-whiskered, and portly. Phillips, the Providence mystic, was lean, gray,long-nosed, clean-shaven, and stoop-shouldered. The fourth man was non-committalin age -- lean, with a dark, bearded, singularly immobile face of very regularcontour, bound with the turban of a high-caste Brahman and having night-black,burning, almost irisless eyes which seemed to gaze out from a vast distancebehind the features. He had announced himself as the Swami Chandraputra, anadept from Benares, with important information to give; and both de Marigny andPhillips -- who had corresponded with him -- had been quick to recognize thegenuineness of his mystical pretensions. His speech had an oddly forced, hollow,metallic quality, as if the use of English taxed his vocal apparatus; yet hislanguage was as easy, correct and idiomatic as any native Anglo-Saxon's. Ingeneral attire he was the normal European civilian, but his loose clothes satpeculiarly badly on him, while his bushy black beard, Eastern turban, and large,white mittens gave him an air of exotic eccentricity.De Marigny, fingering the parchment found in Carter's car, was speaking."No, I have not been able to make anything of the parchment. Mr. Phillips, here,also gives it up. Colonel Churchward declares it is not Naacal, and it looksnothing at all like the hieroglyphics on that Easter Island war-club. Thecarvings on that box, though, do strangely suggest Easter Island images. Thenearest thing I can recall to these parchment characters --notice how all theletters seem to hang down from horizontal word-bar -- is the writing in a bookpoor Harley War-ren once had. It came from India while Carter and I werevisiting him in 1919, and he never would tell us anything about it --said itwould be better if we didn't know, and hinted that it might have come originallyfrom some place other than the Earth. He took it with him in December, when hewent down into the vault in that old graveyard -- but neither he nor the book
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